Container closures, and more specifically, tamper-indicating or tamper-evident closures are well known in the art. In addition, a wide variety of such closures are designed to prevent unwanted opening of the container by, for example, a child. Such closures are commonly referred to as childproof or child-resistant closures.
Some childproof closures include a locking mechanism that requires pressure to be applied to the closure at specific locations to release the closure form the container. In one known form, the closure includes hinged tabs that lock into or engage slots in a portion of the container. The tabs are hinged such that pressure is applied to the tabs at about the top of the closure, e.g., at about a location where the tabs are adjacent to the top wall of the closure. In another known closure, the child-proof feature is provided by one or more detents that are located at about the lower edge of the closure skirt that engage a complementary detents that are formed in the container. The detents are disengaged from one another by applying pressure at about a lower portion of the skirt to separate and thus release the detents from one another.
In one known arrangement, tamper indication is provided by a separable band that extends and depends from the skirt portion. The band engages a locking ring or a locking lug that is formed on the container. The band or lug prevents removal of the closure without first removing the band, or facilitates separating the band from the skirt portion as the closure is removed from the container. Other known tamper-indicating arrangements include skirts having breakable or break-away sections formed as part of the skirt wall and depending break-away tabs.
Although such known tamper-indicating, child-proof closures function well for their intended purposes, there are a number of drawbacks. First, manufacturing such closures can be difficult, given the amount of "tooling" that may be required for a particular design. This is particularly true for those closures having portions of the skirt wall that break away from the skirt body. Moreover, it has been observed that removal of closures that require a significant amount of pressure applied to the skirt lower portion can be difficult for persons that have limited mobility of their fingers.
Accordingly, there continues to be a need for a closure that includes child-resistant and tamper-indicating features. Such a closure has a readily removable tamper-indicating band and closure band in which the band remains intact with the closure cap skirt portion as the closure is initially applied to the container, and in which the band separates from the closure cap upon disengaging the closure from the container.